From Neorealism to Sadism: Remembering Pier Paolo Pasolini

In principle, if Pasolini had been a Hollywood film director, he would have had a chance to gather friends and relatives around him today, as Kirk "Spartacus" Douglas did at 103. But the Italian film director was made of a completely different stuff - he did not pretend to be a tragic marginal hero, but was one in reality.

Pasolini, unlike many European film directors of all times, did not pretend to be a refined intellectual - he, again, was one. He not only made films, but also wrote novels and poems, which are now included in the Italian school curriculum. Pasolini's theoretical articles on literature and cinema were not written "in general", as everyone can do in our time of universal higher education, but on "technological" topics - for example, how certain famous directors built the frame and organized the movement of the camera during filming.

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A theorist, which is extremely rare, was combined in him with one of the best practitioners in the history of cinema. Pasolini's first film, Accattone, about the life of the inhabitants of the Roman slums, shot in 1961 in the spirit of neorealism based on his own novel, can be called the pinnacle of this great cinematic movement.

Pasolini was generally an expert on the life of the Roman social underclass - for example, he wrote scenes for Fellini in his Nights of Cabiria and La Dolce Vita, for which it was necessary to know the specific language and behavior of Roman prostitutes. After all, Fellini was a pure theorist in this matter, unlike the "practitioner" Pasolini, who, due to his homosexual orientation, which was marginal for that time, was forced to use the services of paid street partners - which ultimately became the cause (at least in the official version) of his death.

Having moved from the neorealism of Accattone and Mamma Roma to political satire (between these stages there was also The Gospel According to Matthew, in which Christ appeared as a revolutionary, as well as screen adaptations of ancient Greek tragedies), Pasolini caused scandal after scandal with his anti-bourgeoisness. Especially in his native country, where the Italians, who had risen from poverty to a well-fed life in a few years, did not consider this a disadvantage.

Then Pasolini, to use a football formulation (he loved playing street football as an adult), switched to the other flank in his attack and filmed screen adaptations of collections of stories from the Italian and English Renaissance - The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales and The Flower of a Thousand and One Nights.

Sometimes these films are written about as aestheticism, but if you take, for example, The Decameron, then this is already the first step to Sodom. The crowd, recruited from freaks, in whom Pasolini maniacally demonstrates a toothless mouth (most likely, this is how ordinary people looked in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but this does not change the essence), shabby stone walls inside houses, grub (namely grub, not food), sex, for which this word is too delicate, and dirt, dirt, dirt - that's the whole film.

At the same time, most likely, this is an adequate reflection of those times - after all, Pasolini was, as already mentioned above, an intellectual, that is, an expert in history.

And his thorough knowledge of the contemporary Roman slums of the 50s and 60s is because that is where he was looking for a partner. And, as one might assume, this is where his sympathy for the poor inhabitants of the outskirts of the Great City comes from, whose life he, willy-nilly, studied thoroughly. After all, Pasolini, even having become a famous director and a rich man, remained an outcast because of his sexual orientation. That is why he was so concerned about the lives of other outcasts who became such because of poverty. Hence the criticism of the bourgeois system as a whole, and such attention in his films to Freudianism and psychoanalysis (the same "Oedipus Rex"). (All this is in Pasolini's latest, scandalous and controversial late film "Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom" based on the novel by the Marquis de Sade, a film so provocative and painful (in all respects) that I don't want to write about it - especially since hundreds, if not thousands of pages have been written about it before us. From our point of view, this is a creative (at least creative) failure of the director, but there are other points of view.)

It was this orientation that killed him in 1975, when he was only 53 years old. "Having hired" 17-year-old Giuseppe Pelosi for sex, Pasolini took him late at night to a deserted place, where he met his death. His body, which was found the next morning, was mutilated by beatings to such an extent that it was clear that the killer (or killers) acted in a state of passion. The crime remained unsolved (Pelosi himself initially confessed to it, but later retracted his words).

That is why filmmakers still return to him - in 2014 and 2016, two feature films about the director's last days were shot, the most high-profile of which was "Pasolini" by the almost equally famous and scandalous Abel Ferrara. Pasolini was played by Willem Dafoe, who looked very much like him, and also had a reputation as an actor who starred in two, again, scandalous films in those years - "Antichrist" and "Nymphomaniac".

So Pasolini could not live to the age of Kirk Douglas - not the same character and not the same destiny.

Photo: Wikipedia